life protip: fastest way to kick my butt into gear is to compare me to Goko...
Turns out that a while back I tried to patch the forum via the automated patching page from the admin panel of the forum. That is to say, I went to a page that said PATCH YOUR FORUM FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SECURITY RISKS and clicked YES PATCH ME NOW.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a minute or so, nothing continued to happen.
So I ignored it and went away.
Today I found out that basically this entire time, this patching thing was still gamely trying to patch. And failing. But helpfully generating about 3,000 error messages every second. Every time I rebooted it would stop it for a while, but then mysteriously come back to life and resume generating errors like it's going out of style. (This part I still haven't figured out.)
I've fixed the underlying problem that was causing this infinite loop, thus allowing me to patch, but more importantly dramatically cutting the amount of CPU expenditure this poor forum was enduring. I think that should fix this whole thing, but let's keep our fingers crossed.
TL;DR I'm dumb.
